The world’s major retailers either have, or want to have a presence on the World Wide Web, and many are already experimenting with electronic shopping. ICL Plc’s Retail Systems Inc has set up a Business Warehouse Solutions division to provide custom-built systems for this form of what it calls ‘Precision Retailing. At the heart of these systems is Corema, ICL’s Consumer Relationship Marketing product, which consists of Corema Discover and Corema Reward. Corema Discover is a data mining tool wh ich enables retailers to discover patterns of buying behavior in vast amounts of data, where the retailer does not know what questions to ask. Discover uses a combination of neural network techniques, decision trees and visualization to enable the system to learn patterns and trends from customer data. It enables the retailer to begin to predict not just what the customer will buy, but when they’ll buy it. It runs on Sun Microsystems Inc Unix servers, using an Informix database. Corema Reward enables stores to use the information gleaned from Discover to set up and manage loyalty schemes and consumer promotions. The products are currently being rolled out in the UK, will be available across Europe in the next six months, and in the US in early 1997.
